The slogan “Intel Inside” is true for four out of five personal computers sold today, and the Intel brand remains one of the most recognizable in the world. Advanced Micro Devices has been playing second fiddle year after year. But times have changed, and A.M.D. could find itself perfectly positioned to benefit.
On Tuesday, A.M.D. officially released a new set of chip products, stepping up its game by combining a computer microprocessor and a graphics processor on the same piece of silicon to create ultrafast graphic performance. It’s part of an increasing trend in the chip market to focus on graphics — how well computers and the chips inside them show YouTube videos, run video games and display elaborate PowerPoint presentations. And that, analysts say, is what A.M.D. supposedly does best.
The new chip for mainstream notebooks and PCs — Llano — is supposed to shortly make its way into more than 150 notebooks for mainstream computer users, most priced between $500 and $800, said Rick Bergman, an A.M.D. senior vice president. Among those are nearly a dozen notebooks from Hewlett-Packard, as well as systems from Lenovo, Acer and Dell. Lenovo plans to use Llano in both its IdeaPad laptops for consumers and its ThinkPad line aimed at small-business users to give users a “more immersive PC graphics experiences,” said Jerry Paradise, director of product marketing at Lenovo.
And since nothing eats battery life like running a movie, A.M.D. says the chip also offers dramatically improved battery life. A notebook computer with Llano can run 10 hours, the company said, about double what its predecessors could do.
An earlier graphically advanced chip for ultrathin notebooks began shipping in January and has been well received.
Could it be that A.M.D. may finally have its moment? Graphics is only one of several challenges facing the company, which has been without a chief executive officer since Dirk Meyer left in January after a dispute with the board. That situation is still unresolved.
